Nicolás Valentín Eduardo Díaz Letelier

This research examines Chile’s transition to democracy from the perspective of past members of the dictatorial repressive apparatus: intelligence agents, military officers, and civil collaborators from the many institutions that composed Augusto Pinochet’s secret police (1973-1990). Combining participant observation, life histories, semi-structured interviews, and archival work, I will explore the many lives of former perpetrators of political violence in Chile: from their time in the secret police, through the end of the dictatorship and the dissolution of their units, to their fugitive and under-the-radar years, and finally to their presents and fabulated futures. Engaging with perpetrators and genocide studies in political anthropology, moral anthropology and the anthropology of ethics, and the anthropology of masculinity, I ask how former dictatorial perpetrators have experienced and navigated Chile’s transition to democracy in their everyday lives. In light of the above, this research aims to contribute to anthropological debates on collective life in the aftermath of state terror, theorizations of violence from the under-researched perspective of its enactors, and conceptualizations of subjectivity from the often unmarked inflections of masculinity, as well as the problematic but very human elaborations of others’ ruination and destruction.